Rousseau quotes

Paris is a beast of a city to be into those who cannot getoutof it.Rousseausaidwell, that allthetimehewasin it, he was only trying how he should leave it† The continual panic inwhichthe passenger iskept, thealarm and the escape from it, the anger and the laughter at it, must haveaneffectonthe Parisian character, and tend to make it the whiffling, skittish, snappish, volatile, inconsequential, unmeaning thing it is.

-William Hazlitt
  Notes on a Journey through France and Italy (published 1856).

Imagine Rousseau,Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine, and Hegel united in one personI say united, not lumped togetherand you have Dr Marx.

- Moses Hess
Quoted in  A J P  Taylor's introduction to the Penguin edition of The Communist Manifesto (1967).

Where do you get your taste in authorsThat damned library of yours! (He indicates the small bookcase at rear.) Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen! Atheists, fools, and madmen! And your poets! This Dowson, and this Baudelaire, and Swinburne and O'Neill Oscar Wilde, and Whitman and Poe! Whoremongers and degenerates! Pah! When I've three good sets of Shakespeare there (he nods at the large bookcase) you could read.

- Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
^41  Tyrone. Long Day's Journey Into Night, act 4 (published 1956).